Our Mission and Vision

Mission

BoCo Strong’s mission is working to increase the web of connections among individuals, organizations and governments across Boulder County in ways that will foster inclusivity, increase disaster resilience, and build vibrant and prosperous communities. We define resilience as the capability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce forward rapidly by adapting and learning in the face of disruptive shocks and stresses. Our programming seeks to support and facilitate the individual, organizational, and governmental relationships that strengthen our collective capacity in Boulder County, to maximize resources, and to prevent unnecessary duplication of efforts.

What Do You Mean, “Resilience”?

Our mission is focused on social resilience. As above, we define resilience as: “the capability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce forward rapidly by adapting and learning in the face of disruptive shocks and stresses.” Nice and wordy, right?

But in terms of activity, this means that our programs have the goal of supporting and strengthening relationships between individuals, organizations, and governments. We believe that it’s truly through people connecting, talking, and sharing with one another that we are better able to respond to and recover from any stress, loss, disaster, or downturn.

Vision

By 2025 Boulder County communities will have access to the resources and connections needed to allow all residents to adapt and thrive in the face of community stressors.

What we see as success is having everyone in Boulder County knowledgeable about and connected to the resources that they need to thrive by 2025. We would be happy to write ourselves out of a job at this point, but right now there are plenty of gaps in service delivery, language equity, and resource accessibility that have motivated us to set this goal. We know that there are lots of great organizations doing fantastic work in the community. But we see it as our job to help. With a steering committee made up of people from all over the county, BoCo Strong’s agenda is regional resilience, not individual missions or cities. With this in mind, we can work to connect information and key contacts from all of our smaller networks to unite and align activities from diverse areas.

Seeing The Big Picture

Since we work at a countywide scale and across all the sectors we can find, we are able to promote strategic partnerships between service providers that may be unaware of one another. We offer information sharing tools and strategies so organizations can be more flexible and integrated. We show organizations and community leaders how to put resilience characteristics first and foremost in their decision making. And we help people showcase the projects they are working on, so we can all develop the set of local best practices we need.

But above all: We listen. We gather information. And we connect those who need it. We see the big picture, but you’re the one painting it.